Originally posted by Michael Quarles:
Then EDDM is a bundle.
He's not just whistling dixie - it's about $4828 to market via EDDM to a single small to mid-sized neighborhood in Houston for a year...pricey. You need to shell out a little more than 1/4 of that up front for printing or your costs are much higher.
The less than .21 is accurate but misleading - the way the carrier routes are set up in the areas I've looked at, you need to mail to two routes to cover one neighborhood - each route looks to be on average about 500-800 pieces and the overlap is usually a surrounding neighborhood that you may or may not want to market to...in some areas you'll need to mail to 3, 4 or 5 routes to get that one neighborhood. Postage is .16 per piece so you'll need to buy a metric ton of mail pieces to get your per piece price down to 5 cents - even the online outfits are .065 per when you add in shipping.
...then there's the lack of qualified targets..how many homes are rentals where the occupants aren't qualified to make a selling decision...uninterested...looking for retail sales...etc..etc..
The per piece price starts going up (quickly) if you're unwilling to bundle your mailings into groups of 50-100, do the postal paperwork AND deliver to the mailing post office within their delivery window. The mailing must go to the delivering post office..
It sounds attractive, but it's not for the faint of heart...and I haven't even calculated time spent, these are actual raw costs.
